The Best Indian Food in Charlottesville

Indian restaurant owners in cville, if you are not prepared for some embarrassment, stop reading.

Just to be fair, All this applies only to the buffet’s at Indian restaurants. I’ve not tried ordering off the menu at any and don’t plan to unless I get some nice coupons.

Let me start with some history. Of the Indian restaurants that existed when I moved to cville, only Maharaja is still standing and the food at Maharaja was mediocre at best. After a while, Milan opened and the food there was also mediocre but most liked it more probably because it was slightly different from Maharaja. Later Maharaja’s chef took over Maharaja but I’ve not been to it after then because I wasn’t too pleased with the food anyway. Milan’s chef left Milan and started a new place called Royal Indian just north of Target and I tried the buffet there. All the food was mostly tasteless pasty creamy goo so I will not recommend it at all. I’ve not tried Milan’s new chef but I’ve heard reports the the food has not changed at all.

So considering this, where do you get the best Indian food in Charlottesville? The answer is Just Curry at the corner. They are Carribean style curries but that’s just nice Indian food. There are not many options to select from but the food is really tasty, unlike the bland pastes at lunch buffets at the Indian restaurants.

I actually asked the chef at Royal Indian why the food was so bland and his reply was that it is for the American palette. If that’s the case, I wonder, why is it that Just Curry is full of Americans and Royal Indian is always empty? Indian restaurants, please give us some decent spicy food! Give us some Indian Chinese and stop making us drive to DC for the good stuff.

The others have a generic name #### Curry and they resemble Indian food more than the food at the Indian restaurants in cville. The Just Curry menu – http://www.justcurryva.com/new.menu.pdf – even calls the Butter Chicken “murgh makhani”.